"Can police be improved? Couper thinks so. This is about the 20-year transformation he led in the city police department in Madison, Wisc., the history and subculture of policing, and then the seven steps police are going to have to take to improve today. In Madison, Couper successfully brought educated women and minorities into a basically all-white, all-male police department. He and his officers handled hundreds of protests using the ٢Madison...

"Straight from the mean streets, Walk the Blue Line is a first-person account of the days and nights of America's brave cops"--Dust jacket flap.

They called it Satan's Circus--a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the 20th century, murder was so common there that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel. But when, two weeks later, an ambitious district attorney charged young policeman Charley Becker with ordering the murder, even...

The story of Albert Alonzo "Doc" Ames is perhaps the greatest political scandal in Minnesota history. As mayor of Minneapolis, Ames exposed the city to national humiliation--and helped jump-start an era of reform. At the turn of the twentieth century, Minneapolis was moving away from a time of political rings, frontier justice, and old boys' clubs to a more civic-minded way of governing. But in 1901, the affable, degenerate Doc Ames, a former Minneapolis...

Recounts the effort by newly appointed police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to shut down late nineteenth-century New York City's brothels, gambling houses, and after-hours saloons.